CEO says that he'd been averse to selling but that Bezos "altered my feelings.”

Share this story

In a move that is sure to rock the media world, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is purchasing The Washington Post newspaper. The Washington Post Company will continue as a publicly traded company under a new name without the paper.

In a Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bezos’ personal investment firm, Explore Holdings LLC, wrote that it would purchase the newspaper and other affiliated publications for $250 million.

In an interview with the Post, Bezos dubbed the newspaper “an important institution” and was positive about its future. “I don’t want to imply that I have a worked-out plan,” he said. “This will be uncharted terrain and it will require experimentation.”

“Every member of my family started out with the same emotion—shock—in even thinking about” selling The Post, said Donald Graham, the Post Company’s chief executive, in an interview with the Post on Monday. “But when the idea of a transaction with Jeff Bezos came up, it altered my feelings.”

Added Graham, “The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future. But we wanted to do more than survive. I’m not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”

The Graham family has owned the Post for decades, but the Washington Post Company's most profitable division is actually Kaplan, a commercial test preparation service. According to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report, which was released last week, Kaplan earned profits of over $23 million in the second quarter of 2013 alone.

By comparison, the newspaper division posted an operating loss of $14.8 million during the same period. The Post Company’s cable and TV holdings were responsible for nearly all of the rest of the company’s over $93 million in second quarter profits.

Share this story

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar